Georg Groscurth

Georg Groscurth (1904 to 1944) was a German medical doctor and a member of the resistance to Nazism. He was born the son of a farmer in Unterhaun, in the Province of Hesse-Nassau, studied medicine at Marburg, Freiburg, Graz and Vienna and finished with a doctorate in Berlin. He worked at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry, where he met Robert Havemann, and from 1933 he worked as an internist at the Robert Koch Hospital and later at Moabit Hospital in Berlin. In 1940 he became a lecturer at Friedrich Wilhelm University, and Rudolf Hess became his patient. Groscurth knowingly broke medical discretion to pass on to resistance groups what Hess said in consultations. With Havemann, the architect Herbert Richter-Lukian and the dentist Paul Rentsch he founded the resistance group Europäische Union, which hid Jews and fugitives, and whenever he could he certified soldiers as unfit for combat. The group was betrayed, he was seized on 4 September 1943, sentenced to death by the Volksgerichtshof and hanged at Brandenburg-Görden Prison on 8 May 1944. In 2005 Israel named him Righteous among the Nations.